


love is a fishhook in the heart

by teadrunk



Category: Original Work, Scottish Mythology
Genre: F/M, Forced Marriage, Mythical Beings & Creatures, Mythology - Freeform, Non-Graphic Rape/Non-Con, Selkies, Tragedy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-09
Updated: 2021-01-09
Packaged: 2021-03-16 17:48:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,362
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28585995
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/teadrunk/pseuds/teadrunk
Summary: They say a fisherman down by the sea caught himself a selkie-wife. They say he trapped her with gentle hands and a gentle heart, that she hadn’t realized she began to love him until she already did. They’re half right.or: a portrait of the selkie woman, deconstructed
Kudos: 5





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> no graphic depictions of non-con but it's implied and framed in terms of a wife's marital duty to her husband.  
> he's also very, very creepy.

They say a fisherman down by the sea caught himself a selkie-wife. They say he trapped her with gentle hands and a gentle heart, that she hadn’t realized she began to love him until she already did. They’re half right.

* * *

A fisherman down by the sea sees a selkie one moonlit night as he checks his traps for a catch. His back aches from hours of bending over, and his hands burn from the sting of saltwater despite decades-thick calluses. Fishermen are as close as people can get to mers, but the ocean is still no place for a human. 

And he is lonely—so, so lonely, because this town is a place where dreams only ever die and the fish are no company at all—so when he sees this beautiful, sleek woman rising from the waves, fur coat draped over one shoulder and hair like ink over the other, he thinks _I must have her_. She is wild as the tide, and he has never seen a wild thing that could not be eventually tamed. 

So he leads her back home with him, kisses the underside of her jaw where the salt of the sea has crystallized into perfect white flakes, only time distinguishing them from the bitter tracks of her tears, and takes her to his bed. His wild sea-bride, his beautiful young selkie-girl, collared by his hands and his alone. 

He gives her a name because he cannot pronounce hers, all subsonic vocalizations and playful chirping that human vocal cords could never replicate; he never even asks for it. Because, of course, it’s traditional for a wife to take her husband’s name—what difference does it make?

* * *

She doesn’t know how to cook. Unsurprising, given the lack of functional wood-burning stoves and cast-iron pans underwater, but—well. It's fitting that she must now learn.

He never turns his fists on her, never so much as raises his voice. She fears him anyway: his eyes hunger for something that is not, she knows, the day’s catch, a prospect infinitely more dangerous than any bruise.

So she looks back down at the cutting board. The knife is clumsy in her hands and her arms become dotted with oil burns, but at least this way she doesn’t have to face him and that all-consuming gaze.

She doesn’t know how to cook. She learns.

* * *

As much as his gentle (covetous) touches revolt her, he is her whole world now that she is without sea. The years pass and she softens because _what else can she do_ , because selkies are innately social creatures and she has never not had her pack before. This human is a poor substitute for pod-sisters and seafoam shaded silver under the moon’s loving gaze and freedom as far as the eye can see, but he’s all she has. She hasn’t seen another being in so, so long. 

And she loves him with a terrible love, a love that is not love; something hungrier, something more predatory than the wide-eyed infatuations between teenagers in the sultry heat of summer or the slow, steady companionships of two people who have grown old together. 

Because selkies love in playful chase-and-hunts between the grinding ice floes, they love in courting songs to the tune of currents and in lazily sunning together on rocks, entwined together from nose to tail. Selkie love is _not_ this twisted, destructive, all-consuming thing, not the urge to _possess_ and _break_ what you adore, but she is no longer the seal-girl-woman she once was. He has stolen her from her home, poured his human love-not-love into her, and now she is sick with all the things she has had to take inside of her soul to survive.

These days, he wakes up in the mornings with red marks all down his neck and chest and sees _love_ but all she can see is the feast that her pod could’ve made out of him, the way her now-skilled hands could butcher and save him for a cold winter’s night. The gnawing is a nasty habit, as her mother always scolded her, but she doesn’t think her mother would quite so disapprove now. And it’s not because she hates him—or rather, she loves him even when she does—but because now she understands why he had taken her home, taken her coat, taken her heart. 

(Human) love is a smothering thing that wants and wants and wants even when there’s nothing left to give and oh god, she’s burning up with it. After a lifetime of cool sea and tidal wind like a melody this fire inside of her is _horrible_. But of course it is, of course; there is no uncomplicated in-between where a woman like her can reside, and this is the punishment for those who transgress. She was never meant to live like this—landlocked, no skin, no pod. Like a human.

* * *

They say that fisherman widowed his sea-wife one violent, stormy night, disappeared beneath the waves, never to be seen again. They say a selkie that outlives her husband will spend the rest of her life grieving. They’re half right. 

* * *

On a violent, stormy night, a selkie presses her fisherman husband down into the waves with strong, loving hands as the sea froths higher and higher around them, eager for blood. She wants him to feel the rush of water like silk on his skin and then choke on it, taste it shredding the insides of his throat and setting his lungs on fire. She wants to make him feel the same unquenchable burning that he had lit in her chest when he forced her out of shape, longs to steal his breath away the way he stole so many things from her. Above them, the moon coos, her ever-present yearning for her sea-daughter to _come home to me_ , _we miss you_ finally on the verge of being soothed. 

He dies with a smile on his lips, because the ocean tastes like her tears.

But when she steals back her skin, drapes it across her shoulders in silky folds and races to a secluded cove, the change doesn’t come over her. Drunk on starlight and freedom for the first time in years, she doesn’t notice until she hits the water like a stone, gets caught up in a rip tide and has to fight her way back to shore, a safety that is not safe.

She falls to her knees and weeps, not noticing the grit of the sand abrading her skin, or how her hiccuping cries have scared off the gulls that circled around her in concern. The ocean water laps at her face, almost a comfort, but salt has never burned her skin like this before. Despairingly, she knows that the moon’s gentle touch cannot quench that newly-human fire inside her.

And she will never return to the sea.


	2. a coda, of sorts

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Years later, a beachfront property is put up for sale.
> 
> (Ghosts linger even after the curtain is drawn.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> probs not as good as the first chap lol don't read

Years later, a beachfront property is put up for sale. It is old, well-used and well-loved, made of driftwood planks sanded smooth by sea and storm. On the wall above the fireplace hangs a luxurious fur coat, still supple despite the efforts of time and salt flakes.

Prospective new homeowners come and go, gush about the beautiful view and the homey atmosphere and _wouldn’t it be so perfect, dear?_ Yet each and every one of them leaves, never to be seen at the property again. 

They can’t help but try to justify their departures: it’s out of their price range, some demure. Others say it’s too small— a two-person house, where they seek somewhere to build a family. 

(and later, privately, inevitably: _the house feels so… sad._ )

The woman who ushers them out doesn’t seem to mind— an older woman, widowed, they say. She pats each person on the shoulder, no harm done, with hands rough from decades of lye soap and boiling-hot laundry water or maybe scarred with silver-pink fractals from summers as a seal-pup darting around coral reefs. 

Alone, her eyes track inevitably to the coat above the fireplace. Once, they were alight with barely-concealed desperation, with despair, with suppressed rage. Now they are the eyes of someone who has given up. 

**Author's Note:**

> mc said fuck fishermen all my homies hate fishermen


End file.
